Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Harrison's Flat Stanley in New York!


Well, after helping Harrison’s painter friend Ben with his artwork , for which Ben didn’t seem very grateful, we got on the AMTRAK train and went down to New York City for the weekend….Ben woke me up when the train arrived and said” get up Stan, we are in Manhattan “… I thought we were going to New York City…Ben said that New York is made up of 5 big neighborhoods called Boroughs…Manhattan , where we arrived, is one of the five boroughs and is on an island…how cool is that…the morning in the city was not so great because Ben left me in the envelope but in the afternoon we went over to Brooklyn on a taxi boat…Ben says that Brooklyn is one of the neighborhoods of New York City but it sure looked bigger than a neighborhood to me….we got on the boat taxi near the southern tip of Manhattan , a place called Battery Park…there is an old fort there from the Revolutionary War….as the boat left for Brooklyn we got a great view of the Statue of Liberty…it is a big green woman holding up a torch over her head….Ben says it was a gift from the people in France and welcomes visitors and immigrants to the United States….Ben says almost all Americans have relatives who were immigrants and many of them saw this green lady the first thing when they got here…she really is big, the people below her are so small…
 

When we got to BROOKLYN I got put back in the envelope while Ben visited a friend….but on the way back to Manhattan we didn’t take the boat or the subway, but we walked , well Ben did…I rode in his pocket…the bridge was called the Williamsburg Bridge…the bridge is over the East River, one of the two rivers which make Manhattan an island…the other river is called the Hudson according to Ben. Ben said there was a special reason we took this bridge…as we were approaching the Manhattan side of the bridge, Ben told me to look to the south…he said that Harrison used to live on the 10 th floor  of the big brick building below us…so cool…he used to have this same view from his bedroom that we had from the bridge…there was a park across the street from his building and it was beside the river where boats come and go all day…I was getting tired so Ben put me back in the envelope after taking a few photos…I don’t remember anything else…
 
This Friday afternoon we are going to get on a plane and fly across the entire United States to a town on the Pacific coast called Portland in the state called  Oregon …( there is another ocean on the other side of the country Ben says is called the Pacific )…so that’s it for now…news coming soon from Portland…Stanley